E. W. GODWIN: AESTHETIC MOVEMENT ARCHITECT AND DESIGNER.

Edited by Susan Weber Soros. London: Yale University Press. 1999. [pounds]50

THE SECULAR FURNITURE OF E. W. GODWIN

By Susan Weber Soros. London: Yale

University Press. 1999. [pounds]60

At the end of one (I forget which) of the V&A's two great exhibitions on Pugin and Morris, there was a small comparative section of work by other designers, including Edward Godwin's famous sideboard. After acres of overpowering detail and pattern, the relief of its dazzling simplicity was indescribable. Morris and Pugin were both extraordinary men who exerted enormous influence, not always for the good; but in terms of pure design neither of them had Godwin's unique, if fitful, genius, his ability to make one sit up and jump, his gift for taking elements from the past, or from other cultures, and restating them in far more original and exciting ways than Pugin or Morris ever accomplished.

For 20 years or so Godwin suffered from becoming the property, so to speak, of two successive historians neither of whom produced the authoritative monograph which his admirers were hoping for. But these two new books, splendid in scale and quality of writing and production, do him justice at last. E. W. Godwin was brought out to accompany a big exhibition of his work in New York, an exhibition unforgivably turned down by the V & A. Different authors contribute articles on, among other topics, his work as architect, designer of interiors, furniture, wallpaper and ceramics, theatre designer, and prolific writer in the architectural magazines. The article on his furniture is by Susan Soros, and on a larger scale, her impressive catalogue covers and illustrates all, or virtually all, of his prolific work as a furniture designer.

At his death Godwin was dismissed in obituaries as a gifted failure. His architectural practice certainly petered out; like other gifted architects he was difficult to deal with, and his buildings did not always keep out the rain and the damp. But an architect who got at least 30 of his commissions built, including a batch of masterpieces, cannot be written off as a failure; and Susan Soros lists 426 furniture designs, the majority of which were put into production. Unlike Morris and Pugin, he did not have a burning gospel; he believed in a 'judicious eclecticism', and moved freely, and somewhat restlessly, from style to style and genre to genre; he lacked, perhaps, a consistent sense of direction. It is his Anglo-Japanese furniture which is the basis of his contemporary reputation as a 'pioneer of modern design', but it is a mistake to look at it in isolation from his other work, which was not always simple (or, for that matter, successful), although a gift for simplification is apparent in all his various phases; it is arguable that his best work was done when he had least money to spend.

As a young man he was a Goth, and his particular brilliance is already evident in the knife-edge sharpness of his window-tracery in a church at Ditteridge, the bold simplicity of the little church built on the cheap at Grade, his robust Bristol warehouses and his grand little town hall at Congleton -- arguably more successful than the more elaborate town hall at Northampton, the best feature of which is the chunkily creative Gothicism of the chairs in the Council Chamber. Then comes his romantic period, the seven years of his affair with Ellen Terry, their lovely little high roofed hideout in Hertfordshire, a towered house hidden in the woods for Lord Cowper, a walled kitchen garden or Camelot for cabbages at Castle Ashby, and a hill-top castle in Limerick, fortified against Fenians without, and a mixture of Japanese and Gothic within.

His break-up with Ellen Terry initiated his aesthetic period, his friendship with Whistler and Wilde, his most fruitful years as a furniture designer, and his studio houses in Tite Street, Chelsea, brilliant enough even after the abstract simplicity of the original designs had been mucked up by the Metropolitan Board of Works. Finally, in his last years, he devoted himself almost entirely to the theatre, most memorably perhaps in his two Greek productions, especially The Faithful Shepherdess, a magical evocation of Arcadia in the Surrey woods, with a Greek chariot pulled by splendidly-caparisoned oxen and a colossal statue of Pan, round which (as a faded photograph shows) the chorus circled in a way reminiscent of the Italian students dancing in a ring round Jim Stirling at the Venice Biennale in 1991.

The various periods in all their variety are fully covered in the two volumes under review, and even those already acquainted with his work will find them full of new delights and surprises.